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Boring Girls by Sara Taylor: Review

Murderous revenge, violence tinge this coming of age tale penned by The Birthday Massacre lead singer.

Boring Girls by Sara Taylor, ECW Press 386 pages, $18.95

Sara Taylor, author of Boring Girls.

By Safa JinjeSpecial to the Star

Fri., April 17, 2015

Death metal has a reputation that often precedes it. A fringe subculture of heavy metal, the genre is sometimes dismissed as aggressive, ear-punishing shrieks disguised as music.

The music has been associated with negative ideologies, such as sadism, Satanism, sexism and racism, which is probably why devoted fans of the genre are quick to protect the music from misrepresentation.

So what would death metal fans make of Boring Girls, the debut novel by Toronto musician Sara Taylor? I would wager that they would hate it. The book sashays its way through metal stereotypes as though the author was crossing off a checklist. But considering Taylor is a singer (known as “Chibi”) for the The Birthday Massacre, a popular dark wave, goth rock band, her enmity could stem from her own negative experiences in the metal scene.

There are many other problems with this book, beginning with the author’s poor use of a prologue. The story begins at the end, setting readers up to expect a murderous revenge novel. But first they have to get through 250 pages of tangential inner-dialogue and banal chronicles of “coming-of-age” before the story gets back on track to the promised course of action. And then all the murderous revenge bits are squeezed into the final few chapters.

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Poor, misunderstood Rachel. Despite growing up in a safe community with a nice loving family, she has no friends. At the impressionable age of twelve, she discovers what she believes to be the paragon of female friendship in the Baroque painting Judith Slaying Holofernes (1614-20). The scene, which she unearths in one of her mother’s art books, depicts two women, Judith and her maidservant, beheading a “cruel” war captain. “I wanted a friend like that. I wanted an ally, someone to have a secret with, someone I knew I could rely on, someone I could trust with my very life if I needed to.”

If the prologue hadn’t already given away the ending, this would have been a great instance of foreshadowing. But unfortunately this is one of many frustrating moments that undercuts the literary device. There are also occasions where the novel contradicts its gruesome end. When Rachel discovers metal after an intimidating confrontation with a bully, she rejoices in the violent nature of lyrics such as “Standing on your face/Crushing all your dreams.” But then she says: “Of course, I would never carry out anything violent.”

Boring Girls’ juicy revenge plot is stifled by Taylor’s poor execution. In an effort to build her protagonist into a three-dimensional character, Taylor gives into every impulse to detail Rachel’s insecure ruminations, her growing obsession with all things metal and her contradicting desire to both fit in and stand out. In fact, all Rachel cares about is what others think of her: “I wanted to inspire fear and revulsion in people who tried to undermine me. I wanted to watch their opinion of me change, read it in their eyes.” Boring Girls isn’t so much a novel as it is the fictive journal of a budding psychopath.

In the nature versus nurture argument, Taylor would probably side with the former. Why else would she spend so much of her story exhausting readers with the emotional see-saw that is Rachel’s relationship with her parents? This isn’t normal teenage rebellion. It’s one thing to like metal music and dye your hair black; it is completely another to inflict self-harm and to suppress the damaging effects of sexual assault by waging a violent vendetta.

The novel does offer an important feminist perspective on a culture steeped in misogynism. But by showcasing such a dangerous example of feminism, Taylor may accomplish more harm than good. The only positive outcome I could see from this book is readers seeing themselves in Rachel, and then seeking professional help for their psychological afflictions.

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